What If?

Just read What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe. Some more of the nuggets uncovered from the book include:

• "I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive."
• If you drop superglue on cotton thread - it will catch fire.
• A version of the old joke about half-full glasses - "the engineer sees a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be, the surrealist sees a giraffe eating a necktie"
• "As a rule of thumb, you start to notice compressive heating above about Mach 2 (which is why the Concorde had heat resistant material on the leading edge of its wings)."
• "The ISS moves so quickly that if you fired a rifle bullet from one end of a football field, the International Space Station could cross the length of the field before the bullet traveled 10 yards."
• Did not know this but most modern "passenger cars have some kind of artificial speed limits imposed by the engine computer."
• "If you set out a cup of warn water on Mars, it'll try to boil, freeze, and sublimate, practically all at once. Water on Mars seems to be in any state except liquid."
• "Which brings us to wingsuits - the halfway point between parachute pants and parachutes."
• "GPS timing is incredibly precise; of all the problems in engineering, it's one of the only ones in which engineers have been forced to include both special and general relativity in their calculations."

Some of these are facts I did not know or simply just found interesting. Not sure if any of these facts will ever come into play in real life. To be honest some of the questions are so unrealistically ridiculous that sometimes it's tough to keep focused. However, having said that - it was very humorous and informative.